Print

Mail

wiki links

General suspended over Abu Ghraib mistreatment

The Army general in charge of the US prison guards accused of abusing Iraqis has been suspended from command of the 800th Military Police Brigade, officials said on Monday.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski and other officers in her brigade were faulted by Army investigators for paying too little attention to the prison's day-to-day operations and not acting strongly enough to discipline soldiers under her command for violating standard procedures.

Karpinski's suspension, which has not been announced by the Army, was the latest in a series of actions against officers and enlisted soldiers implicated in the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Last week, Specialist Jeremy Sivits received the maximum penalty of one year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge in the first court-martial stemming from the abuse of Iraqis at the prison. He was among seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company that have been charged.

Karpinski, who has returned to the US, has not been charged with an offense. Being suspended from her command does not mean she has been relieved of command, so technically she could be reinstated, although the intensity of the international furor over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse makes that highly unlikely, the officials said.

In an interview on MSNBC on Monday night, Karpinski said she had been told of her suspension by "several sources, but I have nothing in writing."

The paperwork would cite the reason for her suspension, she said.

Karpinski has said she was being treated unfairly for the acts of others over which she had no control.

"And actions like this renew my thought process of being a scapegoat and using the 800th MP Brigade as the organization responsible for this," she said.

In his widely cited investigation on the Abu Ghraib abuse allegations, Major General Antonio Taguba found heavy fault with Karpinski's performance and recommended that she be relieved of command and given a formal reprimand. Instead she was given a less severe "memorandum of admonishment" on Jan. 17 by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US commander in Iraq.

Taguba reported that despite the documented abuse of prisoners, he saw no evidence that Karpinski ever attempted to remind the military police in her command of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war and civilian detainees in times of armed conflict.
This story has been viewed 1748 times.